Professor Lessig started in copyright. After his defeat in Eldred v. Ashcroft, he traced the blame for the copyright expansions of the 105th Congress (No Electronic Theft Act, Copyright Term Extension Act, and Digital Millennium Copyright Act) back to the source, and the source ended up being politicians who listen to Hollywood and other special interests over their individual constituents. This lead to Change Congress, which became Fix Congress First, which became Rootstrikers. The $100+ that I'd give to Lessig's organization is $100+ that I would have otherwise spent on something that's illegal to produce solely because of these expansions of copyright.

The United States of America, for example. If you're satisfied with T-Mobile or Sprint in one of the areas they cover well, but you move away from their coverage area, you will need to change carriers.

Why come you got no tattoo? Are you unscannable?

Nobody really knows what a smart city is, but it nominally means networked, efficient, and sustainable. Efficiency doesn't include shitting on people when their phone battery dies. It's about aggregating information and acting on it, basically business intelligence on a city scale, to enable people to go about their business. It should be completely transparent to the people in the city. Automated systems would count pedestrian and traffic flows in different areas and adjust light timing, add public transportation units and generally make life easier for the populace. But also, net heat producers feed net heat consumers and so on, it's not so much a thing you build as a level of development you reach. It's not like we're needing whole new cities; indeed, several nations have whole cities standing empty, and whole cities' worth of houses standing empty mixed in besides.

The only similarity between the two is impairment. What I meant, and I suppose I probably should have said it for all the other asshole pedants around here besides me, is that you cannot simply stop being drunk, but you can simply stop talking on the phone. I already have a great deal of experience not listening, because virtually all passengers will make stupid noises when interesting things are happening on the highway, and you must ignore those too. Only those people are right in the car with you, so if you are not an asshole you will have some sort of inherent desire to respond to them, unless they're someone you didn't want in your car in the first place.

That's what happened to my last Chevy.

How shall we regulate the militia if they are armed and we are not?

As long as we have victimless crimes which are felonies, and we do, automatically taking away felons' constitutional right to bear arms is pure, unadulterated bullshit. By all means, deprive them of this right if they are involved in a violent crime. Otherwise, that's just another example of traitorous behavior.

I agree, it's pretty dippy. They should have to give up their guns at the door. On the other hand, I would exercise self-restraint and not go to bars full of guns. On the third hand, what's a guy to do when he goes out to the bar? Leave his gun home? Can't leave it in the car, that's terrible, unless you have both lojack and a bitchin' little safe and not just a lockbox.

If they can prove it was a trade secret, maybe. You don't get to take that "know-how" (depending on laws and agreements) if it's not out.

Sigh. Making it clear that you've never been into the guts of a gun. There's not much in there. There will always be a simple way to defeat these mechanisms. If a mechanism becomes widespread, the means will become known to criminals rapidly. Legitimate gun owners will defeat it, and they will share the information with other legitimate gun owners. It's worthless, and it makes the firearm less reliable.

If you want to improve firearms responsibility, here's a method which can also be easily defeated but which doesn't impinge on their function: a camera should be attached to the gun which takes a picture when the weapon is fired. (It's activated by the mechanism just before the weapon fires.) Every cop's gun should have to have this camera. It might well be reasonable to integrate them into all handguns as well, but that's a whole other argument. Let's see just what they're looking at when they fire.

They're responsible for ten years from the date the recall is issued, unless it's a seatbelt or maybe airbag recall. I believe seatbelt recalls are forever, not sure about airbag recalls but I'd bet the same way on them.

It works on some of my installs, and not on others. My working theory is that windows installs sometimes get owned during install while doing some kind of autoupdate :)

In a lot of cases, the legal theory called inevitable disclosure gets tossed around. It's a way to make a non-disclosure agreement act like a non-compete agreement in jurisdictions that forbid the latter, by convincing a judge that an employee has an unacceptable risk of disclosing trade secrets that he brings with him.

"Ubuntu for Android" is Android that fires up an X11 environment when a Bluetooth keyboard is paired and an HDMI monitor is connected.

How many cookies? It takes 900 quintillion cookies to win over the kitten managers.